Leslie Gelb is a Democrat! (See 1 below.)
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Just returned from the movie "American Sniper." It is a must see!
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What has begun in Europe will spread and eventually occur here . It is a demographic, subsidy, exclusion and PC Multiculturalism issue.
It begins through the political system. First, Muslims seek, as is their Constitutional right, positions on school boards and run for various local political offices. Then they seek employment in the media follow by demands for Sharia law. It is already happening in Georgia and in other states, particularly in Michigan. (Note what Duke tried but because of resistance recanted.)
America's Caucasian population is not sustaining itself whereas Muslims and immigration, legal and/or otherwise, of other ethnic groups ,which we allow, are growing and we subsidize this. The French and most European nations, are financing the demise of their culture and nationhood status because they have been unwilling to educate, integrate and hire their Muslim population in better paying jobs and allowed them to live in exclusive areas.
Because of the way we are handling PC Multi-culturism we are shooting ourselves in our feet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=H-eNXWtXRQI
and
Mark Steyn - Islamic revolution in Europe is Unavoidable
Meanwhile Lloyd Marcus asks WHY? (See 2 below.)
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Once he did a shtick on how to get Africans out of Africa. He began by wondering why would anyone want to live in a desert where nothing grows. His solution, rent a lot of Ryder Trucks and hauling them out.
Caroline Glick suggests pretty much the same! (See 3 below.)
===
Charles Cooke question the merit of SOTUS! (See 4 below.)
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Last night I had dinner with a dear friend, fellow memo reader and my severest critic.
After seeing "American Sniper" he questioned why, if we truly want to win the war against Jihadist terrorists, we don't re-engage and pay Blackwater type mercenaries and let them do it since we are not going to allow American troops to do the job.
In the movie, the rules of engagement were correctly portrayed as becoming so restrictive it is little wonder why anyone volunteers to serve because if they are not careful they could wind up in jail for defending themselves, their buddies and those citizens they fight to protect.
My friend urged me to write a column embracing the idea and though I believe he is right I also do not believe his idea is feasible.
I can just see this president , who wants to close Gitmo and allow Jidhadists to return to the battlefield, doing it. I can just see the Liberal-Progressive PC Crowd allowing it. I do not even see Conservative Hawks allowing it. Nor do I see those who want to serve allowing it.
There is a certain glory that war brings to participants that would be missing among other reasons.
Blackwater types could probably get the job done and at a lower cost and would do it in an efficient manner which would challenge Western sensibilities. Western Culture dictates we be tolerant and sensitive as we engage and kill our enemies.
Post Viet Nam we apparently concluded it is better to lose than win and certainly the world and this president holds Israel to a stricter and more hypocritical standard of engagement.
Part of the reason this attitude developed and now controls is because President Johnson took over, screwed things up and prolonged the war allowing detractors and nay-Sayers more time to work their way on the nation's conscience.
I give credit to G.W for embracing Gen. Petraeus' Surge, who incidentally might be indicted because of Obama and Holder's anti-military attitude. It took a lot of courage for G.W to double up! Certainly, Obama does not have the b---- and would rather embrace half measures, lead from behind, lift sanctions and create a mirage as he mouths progress where none is evident.
So it seems the idea of winning is no longer a compelling reason except for the fact that it would allow a lot of black ink and hand ringing shrill television broadcasts to expose and comment on the various 'atrocities' committed.
Truman knew when he decided to end the war by unleashing our atomic power he would be vilified by some but he calculated he would save more lives by ending the carnage sooner. I doubt what Truman did would be tolerated today because we have humanized and sanitized the act of war and killing to such a degree that we allow more destruction by its continuance.
So to my friend I say, good idea. Impractical and unlikely but welcome to America Post Viet Nam and Obamaworld!
====
Dick
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1) This Is Obama’s Last Foreign Policy Chance
By Leslie H. Gelb
On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.
Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.
They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.
In an impassioned address to the French parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring denunciation of anti-Semitism, and demanded that his people stop treating it as someone else’s problem.
In his words, “Since Ilan Halimi in 2006... anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks... did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.”
Valls insisted that France needs to protect its Jewish community, lest France itself be destroyed.
“Without its Jews France would not be France, this is the message we have to communicate loud and clear. We haven’t done so. We haven’t shown enough outrage. How can we accept that in certain schools and colleges the Holocaust can’t be taught? How can we accept that when a child is asked, ‘Who is your enemy?’ the response is ‘The Jew?’ When the Jews of France are attacked France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget it.”
Valls words were uplifting. But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.
When all is said and done, it is their necks on the line while humanity’s conscience is merely troubled.
Ilan Halimi’s case is more or less a textbook case of the impossible reality French Jewry faces. And, as Valls noted, the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening nine years. Much worse.
But back when things were much better, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured for 24 days and murdered. As Tablet online magazine’s Marc Weitzmann reported last September in an in-depth summary of ordeal, the gang that perpetrated the atrocity had been hunting for Jewish victims for several weeks before Arbabzadeh set her trap for Halimi. All their previous attempts had failed. Their previous marks included Jewish doctors, lawyers, television directors and human rights activists, as well as Jews of no particular distinction aside from the fact that they were Jews.
The anti-Jewish nature of the gang was clear from its chosen victims. The anti-Semitic nature of their atrocious crime against Halimi was obvious from the first time they contacted his mother, Ruth Halimi, demanding ransom for his release. They made anti-Jewish slurs in all their communications with her.
And as she heard her son's tortured cries in the background, Ruth was subjected to his torturers’ recitation of Koranic verses.
And yet, throughout the period of his captivity, French authorities refused to consider the anti-Jewish nature of the crime, and as a result, refused to treat the case as life threatening or urgent.
The same attitude continued well after Halimi was found. As Weitzmann noted, the investigative magistrate insisted “There isn’t a single element to allow one to attach this murder to an anti-Semitic purpose or an anti-Semitic act.”
The denial went on through the 2009 trials of the 29 kidnappers and their accomplices. Anti-Semitism was listed as an aggravating circumstance of the crime – and as such, a cause for harsher sentencing – only for the gang leader Fofana. And in the end, even for him, the judges did not take it into account at sentencing.
As for those 29 kidnappers and accomplices, as Weitzmann notes, each one of them had a circle of friends and family.
As a consequence, by a one reporters’ conservative estimate, at least 50 people were aware of the crime and where Halimi was being held, while he was being held. And not one of them called the police. Not one of them felt moved to make a call that could save the life of a Jew.
After the fact, the media in France were happy to publish articles by the torturers’ defense lawyers insisting, “Only people motivated by ‘political reasons’ would try to sell the opinion that anti-Semitism is eating away at French society.”
When the Halimi family lawyer boasted of close ties to the government and announced he would appeal the sentences of the perpetrators if he didn’t think their punishments were sufficient, the French media eagerly shifted the conversation from the torture and murder of a Parisian who just happened to be a Jew by a band of sadists who just happened to be Muslims, to the more comfortable narrative of the Jewish lobby and Jewish power. So, too, when Halimi, and six years later when the three children and the rabbi massacred at Otzar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse, were brought to Israel for burial, the media reported their decision in a negative way hinting that it was evidence of the basic disloyalty, or otherness of the Jews of France.
In other words, what Halimi’s murder exposed is that anti-Semitism in France is systemic. Muslims are the main perpetrators of violence. And they operate in social environments that are at a minimum indifferent to Jewish suffering and victimization. This violence and indifference is abetted by non-Islamic elites. French authorities minimize the unique threat Jews face. And the media are happy to ignore the issue, or when given the slightest opportunity, to claim that the Jews are responsible for their own victimization.
Indeed, in live reports from the scene of the hostage taking at the kosher supermarket in Paris last week, Weitzmann noted that in the early hours of the attack, French media failed to mention that the hostages were Jews.
Under these circumstances, where the entire French system is stacked against them, what can be done for French Jewry? What can they do for themselves? It is far from clear that France is capable of correcting its downward trajectory.
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy(HarperCollins, 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
2) A New Year: Why, Mr. President, Why?
Happy New Year, my fellow Americans. Getting my butt back into the gym is my New Year Resolution. I saw a guy I thought was around my age who looked fantastic, very muscular. He said he was 57; his secret was protein and creatine supplements.
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The failure of Obama or Biden to show up in Paris made clear that most of the president’s team can’t be trusted to conduct U.S national security policy and must be replaced—at once.
Here’s why America’s failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing. It wasn’t just because President Obama’s or Vice President Biden’s absence was a horrendous gaffe. More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War.
Mr. Obama will have to excuse most of his inner core, especially in the White House. He will have to replace them with strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience. He’ll also need to seed the Defense and State Departments with new top people serving directly as senior advisers to the secretaries. And he also will need to set up regular consultations—not the usual phony ones—with the two key Senate leaders in this field, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, two people who can really improve his decisions and bolster his credibility. Many will be tempted to dismiss these crash solutions as several bridges too far, as simply unrealistic. But hear me out. It can be made much more plausible than it seems at first blush. What’s more, if Mr. Obama doesn’t do something along the lines of what’s proposed here, he and we are in for unmanageable trouble.
Before I continue, I have to tell you that I’ve never made such extreme and far-reaching proposals in all my years in this business. I’ve never proposed such a drastic overhaul. But if you think hard about how Mr. Obama and his team handled this weekend in Paris, I think you’ll see I’m not enjoying a foreign policy neurological breakdown.
It was an absolute no-brainer for either Mr. Obama or Mr. Biden personally to show the American flag on the streets of Paris. Of course every senior staff person should have recommended it three seconds after the news of the Parisian horrors. So far as we know, none did. Sure, this was an inexplicable and utter staff failure, but the president and the vice president shouldn’t have required anyone to tell them what to do in this situation. It was, after all, about terrorism, the main issue of the era. If all these top officials blew this obvious decision, shudder at how they’ll handle the hard ones.First, Mr. Obama will have to thank his senior National Security Council team and replace them. The must-gos include National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, chief speech writer/adviser Ben Rhodes, and foreign policy guru without portfolio Valerie Jarrett. They can all be replaced right away, and their successors won’t require senatorial confirmation.Mr. Obama will not be a lesser man but a greater man if he recognizes what’s at stake and accepts the help he must have to ensure our survival.Here’s who could succeed them and inspire great confidence immediately at home and abroad: first rate former top officials and proven diplomats Thomas Pickering, Winston Lord, and Frank Wisner; Republicans with sterling records like Robert Zoellick, Rich Armitage, Robert Kimmitt, and Richard Burt; or a rising young Democrat of proven ability and of demonstrated Cabinet-level quality, Michele Flournoy. Any one of them would make a huge difference from Day 1 in a top role. Others among them could be brought on to the NSC as senior advisers without portfolio to take the lead on specific problems. These are not just my personal opinions about these individuals; they are practically universal ones.
The State Department really needs help, too. Anthony Blinken, the new No. 2 there, is quite good and should stay. But Secretary of State John Kerry has been described even by the faithful in this administration as quixotic. Any of those mentioned above for the top NSC job could also serve as senior advisers without portfolio to Kerry and Blinken. But they would have to be given real access and authority. Even if they could only do their advising two or three days a week, these are the kind of people who carry most of the relevant information in their heads already, and their experience is unmatched.
Ashton Carter, the defense secretary to be, will be very strong and very good, but he too could use some senior national security/foreign policy advisers to help him through the long list of problems. Particularly good in this role would be Dov Zakheim, a Pentagon undersecretary in a Republican administration. He knows budgets and policy. Carter could also take aboard first rate retired military minds such as Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army.
And Mr. Obama also has a great opportunity that he should try his best to pursue: establishing a genuine working relationship with two new senatorial power brokers. Bob Corker and John McCain really know their stuff and are very good heads. Nothing can stop McCain from going beyond acceptable limits of critiquing Mr. Obama, and if he’s determined to do it so be it, but he has the knowledge and often the good instincts to really improve the president’s defense policies. This can work only if McCain accepts that he is not president of the United States and commander in chief. At some point, he’d have to be a team player as he has proved he can be. Corker is much more self-controlled and a very wise head on foreign policy. The more Americans get to know him in the coming years, the more this gem of a public servant will be recognized.
Finally, Mr. Obama will need the usual wise men for regular informal consultation: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Baker.
These suggestions are all ad hoc and a bit helter-skelter. But no one can figure out how to make the present Obama team work, and I haven’t heard other solutions.
In the end, making the national security system work comes down to one factor, one man—Barack Obama. He’s the key problem, and he’s the only one who can bring about a solution. He’s such a closed person. He’s first rate as an intellectual thinker, but he thinks about problems as an intellectual and not as a policy maker and a leader. Alas, that’s just too clear. He also doesn’t like to be challenged with give and take. If he were to bring in the kind of people I suggest, he would have to resolve at the outset to give them a full hearing and tangible respect for their views.
The world’s challenges to America today are not mere distractions from domestic priorities. They are gut challenges to our national security in the Middle East, with Russia and China, and with the terrorist threat inside and outside our borders. The terrorism and cyber warfare challenges in particular imperil our very survival.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mr. Obama will not be a lesser man but a greater man if he recognizes what’s at stake and accepts the help he must have to ensure our survival. End of story.
2) A New Year: Why, Mr. President, Why?
Happy New Year, my fellow Americans. Getting my butt back into the gym is my New Year Resolution. I saw a guy I thought was around my age who looked fantastic, very muscular. He said he was 57; his secret was protein and creatine supplements.
As I begin 2015, another year into the battle to save my country, I observe the daily news, thinking, “Same old, same old.” President Obama continues to, in essence, give Congress and American voters the finger, arrogantly governing unilaterally against the best interest, the will, and the protection of the American people.
My dear friend Victoria Jackson, former star of SNL, has been deemed a nutcase for calling Obama a Muslim and a communist. While I cannot confirm whether or not Vickie and other pundits are correct in their assessment, clearly Obama is on a different page from those of us who love freedom and America.
The question that continues to nag millions of Americans is, why does this man do what he does? Why, Mr. President, why?
Why did you bring Ebola to America? Why do you refuse to place a travel ban into America on Ebola-riddled countries?
After abdicating your responsibility to enforce immigration law, why did you sue Arizona for enforcing immigration law, leaving Arizonans open to attacks from smugglers and violent Mexican drug cartels?
Why do you block border patrol officers from doing their job? Why did you dis American voters by granting executive amnesty to five million illegals?
Why are you planning to give illegals Social Security numbers, opening the floodgates for them to claim any number of credits – rewarding them for entering our country illegally with checks written by American taxpayers?
You once admitted that an influx of illegal immigrants will harm “the wages of blue-collar Americans” and “put strains on an already overburdened safety net.” Why then would you implement an open-border policy guaranteed to attract the poor from around the world, encouraging them to break our immigration laws and receive taxpayer-funded handouts? Why have you forced schools across America to take in illegal students carrying various diseases?
Why did you refuse to call the shooting at Ft. Hood a “terrorist attack,” which blocked the victims and their families from receiving their entitled combat benefits? Why did you run to read the Boston bomber his Miranda rights, which blocked interrogators from questioning him about other planned attacks on Americans?
Why did you join Al “scumbag” Sharpton and other race profiteers in furthering their insidious, divisive, hate-generating lie that America's police target and murder blacks?
Why did you lie to the American people on at least 29 occasions that if they liked their health care plans and their doctors, they could keep them?
Why did you attempt to bully the beautiful ministry of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a 100-year-old order of nuns, to violate their faith by forcing them to sign a form supporting abortion services?
Why does your Obamacare continue to cause millions to lose health care plans they like, and cancer patients to lose the doctors credited with saving their lives?
Why did you deny additional security requests at our consulate in Benghazi, which led to the death of U.S. Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans during a 9/11/2012 terrorist attack? Why did you order the Benghazi Annex security team to “stand down” rather than attempt to rescue our ambassador?
Why were military assets not deployed to defend our Benghazi consulate and save our ambassador?
Why did you send Susan Rice on five national TV shows to knowingly lie to the American people, telling them that the Benghazi attack was caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video that was seen by hardly anyone? Why do you persist in claiming that the war on terror is over despite glaring worldwide evidence proving otherwise?
Why did you choose to pass on attending the historic Paris, France rally, in which 40 nations came together against Islamic extremism? Why do you refuse to admit that we are at war with radical Islam?
Why did you release five lethal Taliban terrorist leaders, and why do you continue to release other terrorists certain to re-enter the battlefield to kill more Americans?
Why did you demand that the name of Jesus be covered up on a stage before you spoke? And yet you passionately defend Islam. Why did you offer a new asylum decree favoring Muslims over Christians?
Why have you forcefully burdened our military with social engineering policies that critics say will undermine good order and discipline for decades?
Why have you launched a war on coal, estimated to cost nearly a quarter-million jobs per year and force plants across America to close?
Why do you vow to veto the Keystone XL oil pipeline bill, which would further energy independence and create jobs for thousands of Americans?
Folks, cited in this article is only the tip of the iceberg of Obama's war on America as founded: his attacks on traditional Americanism and Christian values, his unseemly attempts to divide us along racial lines to silence opposition to his overreaches, his thuggish use of government agencies to bully and intimidate Americans into submission, his encouraging the sin of covetousness/class envy to divide Americans along economic lines, his attempts to addict as many Americans as possible to government dependency, and his relentless efforts to diminish the worldwide influence of the United States of America.
Who are you, Mr. President? Why are you always on the wrong side of what is best for America and her people? What is your ultimate goal?
Many of us are scratching our heads, asking...why, Mr. President, why?
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3)-Jews, get the blazes out of France . .. NOW!
By Caroline B. Glick
January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.
On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.
Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.
They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.
In an impassioned address to the French parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring denunciation of anti-Semitism, and demanded that his people stop treating it as someone else’s problem.
In his words, “Since Ilan Halimi in 2006... anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks... did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.”
Valls insisted that France needs to protect its Jewish community, lest France itself be destroyed.
“Without its Jews France would not be France, this is the message we have to communicate loud and clear. We haven’t done so. We haven’t shown enough outrage. How can we accept that in certain schools and colleges the Holocaust can’t be taught? How can we accept that when a child is asked, ‘Who is your enemy?’ the response is ‘The Jew?’ When the Jews of France are attacked France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is attacked. Let us never forget it.”
Valls words were uplifting. But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.
When all is said and done, it is their necks on the line while humanity’s conscience is merely troubled.
Ilan Halimi’s case is more or less a textbook case of the impossible reality French Jewry faces. And, as Valls noted, the situation has only gotten worse in the intervening nine years. Much worse.
But back when things were much better, Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured for 24 days and murdered. As Tablet online magazine’s Marc Weitzmann reported last September in an in-depth summary of ordeal, the gang that perpetrated the atrocity had been hunting for Jewish victims for several weeks before Arbabzadeh set her trap for Halimi. All their previous attempts had failed. Their previous marks included Jewish doctors, lawyers, television directors and human rights activists, as well as Jews of no particular distinction aside from the fact that they were Jews.
The anti-Jewish nature of the gang was clear from its chosen victims. The anti-Semitic nature of their atrocious crime against Halimi was obvious from the first time they contacted his mother, Ruth Halimi, demanding ransom for his release. They made anti-Jewish slurs in all their communications with her.
And as she heard her son's tortured cries in the background, Ruth was subjected to his torturers’ recitation of Koranic verses.
And yet, throughout the period of his captivity, French authorities refused to consider the anti-Jewish nature of the crime, and as a result, refused to treat the case as life threatening or urgent.
The same attitude continued well after Halimi was found. As Weitzmann noted, the investigative magistrate insisted “There isn’t a single element to allow one to attach this murder to an anti-Semitic purpose or an anti-Semitic act.”
The denial went on through the 2009 trials of the 29 kidnappers and their accomplices. Anti-Semitism was listed as an aggravating circumstance of the crime – and as such, a cause for harsher sentencing – only for the gang leader Fofana. And in the end, even for him, the judges did not take it into account at sentencing.
As for those 29 kidnappers and accomplices, as Weitzmann notes, each one of them had a circle of friends and family.
As a consequence, by a one reporters’ conservative estimate, at least 50 people were aware of the crime and where Halimi was being held, while he was being held. And not one of them called the police. Not one of them felt moved to make a call that could save the life of a Jew.
After the fact, the media in France were happy to publish articles by the torturers’ defense lawyers insisting, “Only people motivated by ‘political reasons’ would try to sell the opinion that anti-Semitism is eating away at French society.”
When the Halimi family lawyer boasted of close ties to the government and announced he would appeal the sentences of the perpetrators if he didn’t think their punishments were sufficient, the French media eagerly shifted the conversation from the torture and murder of a Parisian who just happened to be a Jew by a band of sadists who just happened to be Muslims, to the more comfortable narrative of the Jewish lobby and Jewish power. So, too, when Halimi, and six years later when the three children and the rabbi massacred at Otzar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse, were brought to Israel for burial, the media reported their decision in a negative way hinting that it was evidence of the basic disloyalty, or otherness of the Jews of France.
In other words, what Halimi’s murder exposed is that anti-Semitism in France is systemic. Muslims are the main perpetrators of violence. And they operate in social environments that are at a minimum indifferent to Jewish suffering and victimization. This violence and indifference is abetted by non-Islamic elites. French authorities minimize the unique threat Jews face. And the media are happy to ignore the issue, or when given the slightest opportunity, to claim that the Jews are responsible for their own victimization.
Indeed, in live reports from the scene of the hostage taking at the kosher supermarket in Paris last week, Weitzmann noted that in the early hours of the attack, French media failed to mention that the hostages were Jews.
Under these circumstances, where the entire French system is stacked against them, what can be done for French Jewry? What can they do for themselves? It is far from clear that France is capable of correcting its downward trajectory.
Demography is moving France in a different direction. According to Israeli political scientist Guy Bechor, Marseilles will be the first Western European city with a Muslim majority. The ruling Socialists owe their victory to the Muslim vote. It is hard to see French President François Hollande and his comrades taking actions that could anger that constituency which votes as a bloc.Moreover, anti-Semitism in all its forms is manifested throughout French society. For instance, the prosecutor in the Halimi murder trial is the son of a French Nazi collaborator and according to Weitzmann, spent an inordinate amount of the trial trying to understand the perpetrators.
Then there is the Israel issue. Valls has distinguished himself from his colleagues for his willingness to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
But his is a voice in the wilderness. The overwhelming sentiment of the French elites is hostility toward Israel.
This sentiment was manifested in Hollande’s treatment of Israel, and through it of the French Jewish community, in the aftermath of the supermarket massacre last Friday.
Hollande told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attend the anti-terror march in Paris on Sunday, claiming that Netanyahu’s presence would detract from the message of unity against terrorism that he hoped the march would communicate.
The underlying assumption of Hollande’s message is deeply disturbing.
That assumption is that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism and is not, as a result, evil. The subtext is that the murder of Jews by Islamic terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction is similarly not a crime deserving of the same condemnation as the jihadist murder of French journalists.
Netanyahu rightly ignored Hollande’s request that he not attend. And for this move he was subjected to harsh criticism by the French media which accused him of crashing the party and pushing himself onto center stage against the wishes of his unwilling hosts.
Their criticism was then parroted by the Israeli media that studiously ignored the endemic anti-Israel hostility of the French media and the anti-Israel policies of the Hollande government. The Hebrew media, together with Hatnua leader Tzipi Livni, also ferociously attacked Netanyahu as well as Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett for upsetting French sensibilities by calling on French Jewry to make aliya, ascend to the Holy Land.
But aliya is the key for contending with the increasing danger that the Jews of France face from the systemic nature of French anti-Semitism. This is true first of all because as France makes it clear that it is not a warm home for its Jews, Israel is a better option. Israel exists so that Jews always will have a better option than suffering at the hands of hostile non-Jews.
Speaking of aliya is also essential because so far the only thing that has caused French authorities to speak directly against anti-Semitism and take action to defend French Jewry has been the prospect of a mass exodus of their Jews.
The year 2014 saw a 50 percent increase in French aliya. And the Jewish Agency anticipates that that number will double to 15,000 in 2015, with 50,000 more not far behind.
After Ilan Halimi was murdered, out of fear of upsetting the French, no Israeli leader, including then-foreign minister Livni, uttered a word of condemnation against the atrocity. No Israeli representative attended his memorial ceremony.
No one urged French Jews to make aliya.
And the number of anti-Semitic attacks increased massively each year. French governmental hostility toward Israel similarly escalated with each passing year.
There is unfortunately every reason to believe that the massacre at the kosher supermarket in Paris last Friday will not be the last one. But it is also clear that the best way to avert more suffering is to speak often and forcefully about the option of moving to Israel. Israel must also take active steps to prepare the country for the arrival of our French brothers and sisters.
Hollande will certainly express his annoyance as he continues to condemn Israel at every turn for imaginary misdeeds. But the French Jews will be strengthened. While the conscience of humanity may be uselessly miffed by the victimization of Jews, the Jews of France will know that there is one place on earth that exists to prevent that victimization, and that they are welcome here whenever they choose to come.
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On Tuesday evening, at just after nine o’clock, an American citizen will give a political speech, and for a brief moment the media’s world will stop turning on its axis. Dropping what they were doing, every news station will broadcast his words live; a cabal of quick-draw analysts will wait in the wings to defend or to attack his ideas; the newspapers and opinion journals will start the process of dissecting it nine ways to Sunday; and, after the dust has settled, the White House will declare victory. Meanwhile, admirably disinterested in such things as it is, the public will mostly tune out.
And yet, as latently as they may be aware of the details, most will accept its occurrence as if it were mandated by nature itself. They should do no such thing. As a matter of basic constitutional propriety, there is something unutterably rotten about the State of the Union. The essential principle of the American settlement, Thomas Jefferson confirmed in a 1797 letter, “is that of a separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions.” And as far as possible, he added, it is incumbent upon “every friend of free government” to keep it that way. Why, then, each and every January are we happy to watch the head of the executive branch walk slap bang into the middle of the legislature and deliver an unchallenged, immoderate, and entirely self-serving lecture about himself and his desires? Why do we permit one branch to issue a campaign speech in the heart of enemy territory? How do we imagine we are serving the interests of fractured government by assembling all of its moving parts in one place?
Within the English system of government — in which the executive and the legislature are fused — such an arrangement would make perfect sense. Within the Madisonian system, however, it is little short of preposterous — especially when one considers that the legislature is accorded no opportunity whatsoever to push back. Explaining his decision to abolish the practice in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson contended that the new country should not tolerate a pageant so similar in nature to the British Speech from the Throne, and announced instead that he would be fulfilling his constitutional duties in writing. Hoping to forestall what he would later describe bitterly as the “mimickry” of “royal forms and ceremonies,” Jefferson instead elected to forsake the “pompous cavalcade” and to eschew all of those “forms and ceremonies” that were “not at all in character with the simplicity of republican government.” Henceforth, Jefferson hoped, the report would be delivered on paper.
This reticence was both admirable and radical, serving not only as a rare example of a powerful man willingly limiting his own grandiosity — and as a salutary lesson in how the separation of powers should be regarded by all — but helping also to calibrate the political expectations of a people who remained unsure as to whether one could actually run a successful nation without putting a monarch or a Great Man at the helm. That the practice that Jefferson strangled was eventually resuscitated by that outspoken enemy of republican virtue, President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, should frankly worry anybody who is concerned about the maintenance of political balance in America. Champions of the legislature might be alarmed, too, to learn that, after the infinitely laudable Calvin Coolidge had reversed Wilson’s course, the spoken address was brought back once again by the most imperial of all America’s imperial presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The State of the Union, we might say, is a Jacksonian rather than a Jeffersonian game.
Increasingly, alas, it is an Obaman one, too. Since the practical consequences of his 2010 electoral “shellacking” became clear to him, the president has spent a good amount of his time mocking the legislature’s claims to power — and, in such instances as it has had the audacity to disagree with him, promising to ignore it completely. “If Congress won’t act,” Obama has threatened over and over again, “I will.” And yet, in spite of these provocations, large swaths of that same legislature are at present preparing to smile and to holler and to applaud their great leader —even, it can be guaranteed, when he is explaining to them how he intends to usurp their prerogatives. Last year, major players in both the Senate and House wroteletters to Obama in which they actively pleaded with him to make an end run around their institution. “What we want,” Luis
Gutierrez confirmed spinelessly, is for the executive branch to forget Congress and to “act big, act bold, act broadly, and act soon.” A few short weeks later, the president did. What was Gutierrez’s reaction? Delight.
This, I’m afraid, is rather instructive. For all the heady disregard that modern presidents have shown toward the established limitations of their office, a great deal of the blame for our predicament must be placed at the feet of Congress itself. It has long been the case that American presidents are possessed of opportunities that are unavailable to those in the legislative branch, and, as the culture has changed, this imbalance has only grown more acute. Because there is just one chief executive, his words inevitably puncture and carry, in a manner that the disparate messages of the 535 members of the federal legislature never will. Moreover, with the advent of mass media, of Huxleyan attention spans, and of celebrity worship, the asymmetry has become even more pronounced than it was at the time of the Founding. As it stands, President Obama has a considerable structural advantage over Congress, and knowing this to be true, is entering the twilight of his presidency in the expectation that he will profit from it. It can certainly not be hoped that this chief executive will limit himself in the name of abstract, Jeffersonian principle — nor, for that matter, is it likely that his successor will, either. But why, one has to wonder, does Congress continue to applaud the charade?
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